This was a
very tough read. The language was very dense and I had to sometimes read over
certain passages several times just to get the gist of it. However, once I got
through it, I enjoyed several aspects of discourse communities. I also
appreciated the introductory “Framing the Reading” part, because it helped
explain and prepare most of the reading for me. It defined some of the terms
Swales used, which helped when trying to decipher the piece.
The six
criteria Swales outlined made it a bit easier to understand what exactly a
discourse community is. These six characteristics: goals, mechanisms, transfer
of information, genres, lexis, and changing membership, define what can be a
discourse community. It was interesting to read about the different groups that
Swales classified. The Hong Kong Study Circle and café owners are discourse
communities, but political parties and people who work at a certain university,
are not discourse communities.
Now I
wonder what groups I may be involved in that are considered discourse
communities. One example that I can think of may be musical composers. I write
music for my band, but I have written music for all types of instruments, so I
consider myself a composer. The goal of all composers is to write and share
music. We use mechanisms of intercommunication like different musical terminology.
The music that we write could be considered the information that we try to
communicate with these mechanisms. When I first read genre, I immediately thought of musical genres, but composers have their own genre (in Swales' definition) that they understand rhetorical situations with. There are many lexis and terms specifically created
for the composition of music. Last but not least, there are always new and
upcoming composers, such as myself, slowly replacing the modern and experienced
composers, such as Eric Whitacre (I could only dream). Going through the six
requirements, I believe I have correctly established musical composers as a
discourse community.
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